There’s a King Richard in Every Town

And he’ll leave a broken kid behind.

When I was in my teens, I loved sports (I still do). Every afternoon I’d go to the school gym and do a session with weights, ropes, and everything else. And there she was, a girl, a couple of years younger than me, doing intervals and tempo runs before I even knew what that was. She was skinny, athletic, like a tiny gazelle, and looked focused. This is what a future pro looks like; that much was obvious to me at that time.

And there was her father with a stopwatch in his right hand and a spreadsheet in his left, keeping a record of her reps.

Much like King Richard, he had a plan.

Only that it didn’t work out; more than two decades later, that girl is now a mother, not obese, but not exactly a gazelle either. You can tell it’s been quite a while since her last tempo run (I think she was still a kid when she revolted against sports).

She didn’t want to be a part of somebody else’s plan.

Now, be honest and tell me, how many fathers like this have you known? I bet there’s more than one in every town, perhaps one per neighbourhood. Overly ambitious, slightly narcissistic, and with eyes on the prize. He somehow missed his chance, and now he needs somebody else to get it for him. That’s his plan.

Every now and then, magic happens. Kids fall for it; they love the plan and execute it with grace. Not just Venus & Serena, there are the Poglar sisters in chess, an even more absurd example of planned parenthood. Their father, László Polgár, not only had a plan but has published it in scientific journals and magazines, hoping to find a suitable mother to help him execute it.

It worked! He and his wife had three daughters, Zsuzsa, Zsófia, and Judit, “whom he raised to be chess prodigies, with Judit and Zsuzsa becoming the best and second-best female chess players in the world, respectively. Judit is widely considered to be the greatest female chess player ever as she is the only woman to have been ranked in the top 10 worldwide, while Zsuzsa became the Women’s World Chess Champion.” (source)

Compared to the scientific rigour of the old Poglar, even King Richard looks like an amateur.

And there’s Ante Kostelić, immortalized by the colossal skiing triumph of his daughter Janica and son Ivica. All that in a Mediterranean country with no tradition of alpine skiing.

But for every Richard, Ante, or László there are hundreds if not thousands of fathers who fail and leave behind kids that end up hating sports, chess, or whatever other plans their fathers had in mind. I know of examples when kids even ended up hating their parents. The amount of work was too much for them; they saw no meaning in it and, most importantly, they couldn’t get over the fact that they were merely an instrument of their parents’ crazy ambitions.

This is the statistical reality of fathers who have a plan.

King Richard, Ante Kostelić, and László Polgár aren’t a rule — they are exceptions — incredibly rare flukes which should by no means be generalized. This is why they make movies about them, making us all too easy to ignore a large graveyard of failed plans and (often) wasted childhoods.

PS: Otherwise a great movie.